Our purpose at the Omega Institute is to help the believer understand and appreciate the doctrines of Scripture in a way he or she can truly digest and apply. This series of devotionals cover the spectrum of Evangelical biblical doctrine in such a way that the Christian can meditate each week on a different truth from Scripture so as to master the essentials and better know and serve his or her Lord.
Key Verse:
“For if the blood of goat and bulls and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling those who have been defiled sanctify for the cleansing of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit, offered Himself without blemish to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God. . .”
—Hebrews 9:13,14
We have been spending some time considering the implications of the Trinity: the doctrine which describes the very nature of our God and how His nature impacts what He does and how we as His people relate to Him. In this, our fourth installment of this series of devotionals dedicated to the Trinity, we consider the third Person of the Triune Godhead: the Holy Spirit.
It can be safely noted that the Holy Spirit is the most mysterious member of the Trinity. I am often reminded of this fact when considering the abbreviated expression of faith regarding the Spirit in the original version of the Nicene Creed formulated in A.D. 325:
“We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father [the only-begotten; that is, of the essence of the Father, God of God], Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father; by whom all things were made [both in heaven and on earth]; who for us men, and for our salvation, came down and was incarnate and was made man; he suffered, and the third day he rose again, ascended into heaven; from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead. And in the Holy Ghost.”
Note the striking difference in detail between the description of the first and second Persons and the third. This five word expression says little other than the Church’s affirmation of faith in the existence of this third Person. I find it curious that, in writing this article on my laptop, my grammar checker identified this final insertion of the creed on the Holy Spirit as a fragment!
Why is this? The early Church needed to further investigate Biblically the nature and ministry of this third Person at the time of the first Nicean Council, and by the time the Creed was expanded and updated 56 years later in A.D. 381 at the Council of Constantinople, the following addition appeared:
“And in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified, who spoke by the prophets. In one holy catholic and apostolic Church; we acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins; we look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.”
Although the Person and Deity of the Holy Spirit is fully documented in Scripture and affirmed through the Church’s history, His role in our salvation and our daily life is often either minimized or sensationalized. It is the responsibility of the child of God to maintain a balanced, Biblical understanding of the place the Spirit of God plays in our redemption and our relationship with the Almighty. In order to appreciate this understanding, let’s consider this passage from the book of Hebrews:
“For if the blood of goat and bulls and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling those who have been defiled sanctify for the cleansing of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit, offered Himself without blemish to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God. .”
Hebrews 9:13, 14
Here, the author of Hebrews compares the efficacy of the Old Covenant’s sacrifices and the New Covenant’s perfect sacrifice in the Person of Christ. The phrase “how much more” is one of the reasons I believe that Paul may possibly be the author of the book of Hebrews, as he often uses this phrase to demonstrate the force of his argument when expressing the supremacy of Jesus over all He is compared to. Notice what the author is saying here: the blood of Jesus cleanses our conscience from sin in a manner that “dead works” (our own efforts to please God with the good deeds we do) can never do – but this cleansing comes about in the life of the believer through someone else: the eternal spirit. This someone else is presented to the disciples by our Lord Himself in John 14:16, 17 –
“I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may be with you forever; that is, the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because the world does not see Him or know Him, but you know Him because He abides with you and will be in you.”
When Jesus described the Holy Spirit as “another Helper,” He used two important words that give us a hint as to the Spirit’s nature and His relationship to the Son as well as to the believer. The word translated “another” is one of two words used in the Greek language which translate this way: allos and heteros. Allos refers to another of the same kind or of the same class – heteros refers to another of a different kind or class. Jesus uses the word allos here, positing the Spirit of God as Someone who is of the same class or kind as Himself. Being the third member of the trinity, we understand that the Spirit of God is of the same essence as the Father and the Son – He is equally divine. Jesus Himself is called our Helper by this same apostle John in his first letter:
“My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. And if anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.”
1 John 2:1
The word Advocate is the same as that which translates Helper in John 14:16; and because these two Persons work together in our redemption, the author of Hebrews reveals just how they minister to us in securing our relationship with God. It is the sacrifice of Jesus Christ that purchases our redemption; it is His blood that satisfies the righteous demands of God to make sinners acceptable in His sight (note that the very next verse in the 1 John 1 passage – v. 2 – speaks of Jesus being our propitiation: the very satisfaction of God’s demands on our behalf) and it is through (or by the agency of) the Spirit of God that this redemption is applied to the believer.
The Holy Spirit makes ours personally the redemption the Son of God accomplished on our behalf. Here you see the connection: the Father loves us and sends His gracious gift to us in the Person of Christ (Titus 3:4-6) who then gives His perfect life and purchases our redemption with His blood, and this redemption is made ours personally through the work of the Spirit of God who, as our Lord Himself made clear, is that Person of the Triune Godhead who most intimately relates to the Christian.
How incredible it is to consider that the entire Godhead: Father, Son and Holy Spirit work in harmony with one another to secure our eternal destiny for those who God has chosen to be His own! The difference the Trinity makes in considering the third Person: the Holy Spirit, is that we come to appreciate the fact that this Spirit makes all that Christ gives ours, and that we are His in that He, our Lord, desires us to consistently give ourselves to Him in the most real and intimate of ways.
But more on that next week.
—Larry Carrino
